In October 2019, CMES Director William Granara spent part of his sabbatical year convening the first international symposium organized by the Tunisia Office of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies: Mediterranean Cousins: Tunisia and Italy on Opposite Shores, designed to examine kinship, exchanges, and divides between Tunisia and Italy across time.... Read more about Mediterranean Cousins: Tunisia and Italy on Opposite Shores

The original script made it look easy. I was going to be Acting Director for a year, while Bill Granara would enjoy his hard-earned sabbatical leave. The first eight months were indeed smooth, thanks above all to our administrative staff, working with great professionalism and efficiency under (to me) Lady Lauren Montague. Speaking of our staff colleagues, the Fall opened with the felicitous news that Carol Ann Young had given birth to Olive, whose visits to the center were the most cheerful moments of the semester—no contest.... Read more about Year in Review: A Message from 2019-20 CMES Acting Director Cemal Kafadar

During spring 2020, Gavin Moulton '20 worked in Harvard's Fine Arts Library with the newly acquired Binney Collection of Orientalist Prints, a group of prints, drawings, lithographs, and other ephemera related to perceptions of the Ottomans in Western and Central Europe. Moulton, who has studied Turkish with Precepter Meryem Demir and Senior Preceptor...

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to become a research partner with the Critical Landscapes Design Lab, affiliated with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Directed by CMES Steering Committee member ...

On July 10, 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed an order which would allow the disintegration of Hagia Sophia’s museum status and turn it back into a mosque. Read an analysis in the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School by CMES AM student and JMEPP...

While conducting dissertation research in Italy during the 2019-20 academic year, Maryam Patton, PhD candidate in History and Middle East Studies, has had the unusual fortune to experience both severe flooding in Venice and quarantine in Florence. Here is her account.... Read more about Timelessness in Florence: Lockdowns, Flooding, and Disruption

CMES Director William Granara, Gordon Gray Professor of the Practice of Arabic, has been awarded a 2020 Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship for his book Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean...

It should not have taken a string of tragic and highly visible incidents of police brutality in the middle of a suffocating pandemic to sharpen the need to recognize and reckon with anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery, but it did. Watching or reading about the horrifying final moments of the murder of George Floyd, some of us were immediately reminded of Radio Raheem—how is that for a name with "Middle Eastern" resonances?—and his tragic end, "fictionalized" more than thirty years ago in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989).*

At least, on this occasion, Floyd...

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies endorses the June 29 statement by the Board of the Middle East Studies Association condemning systemic racism and anti-Blackness: "We stand in solidarity with our Black American members, as well as with Black and Afro-Diasporic members in the United States, Canada, the Middle East and North Africa." Read the full text of the statement on the...

Rosie Bsheer, Assistant Professor of History, and Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, both core faculty members of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, recommend the following books on race and slavery that have special relevance for Middle East studies. For information on locating books at a library near you, visit www.worldcat.org...

"COVID-19 has shown that atypical, transnational security issues need to be taken seriously. Man-made threats are not the only forces that can devastate the globe and fundamentally disrupt daily life," writes second-year Center for Middle Eastern Studies AM student Margaret Dene, in an article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where she is a summer Research Associate. Read the complete article on the Foreign Policy...

In January 2020, NELC PhD candidate Hacı Osman (Ozzy) Gündüz joined a dozen other graduate and undergraduate students from across the University for CMES’s fourth annual Winter Term Study Excursion to Tunisia. Here is his account of the trip.... Read more about CMES Marks Fifth Winter Term in Tunisia

In a recent joint statement, Harvard University Centers condemn recent police violence in the United States:... Read more about Center for Middle Eastern Studies Joins Other Harvard University Centers and Institutes Condemning Police Violence in the United States

CMES is pleased to congratulate this year's graduating class of eight students who earned a master's degree in Regional Studies—Middle East and its graduating PhD students.

... Read more about Congratulations, CMES Graduates 2019–20!